The invention relates to the fields of cell culture and detection.
In many industries, particularly the food, beverage, healthcare, electronic, and pharmaceutical industries, it is essential to rapidly analyze samples for the degree of contamination by microorganisms, such as bacteria, yeasts, or molds.
One microbial culture technique, called microbial enumeration or colony counting, quantifies the number of microbial cells in a sample. The microbial enumeration method, which is based on in situ microbial replication, generally yields one visually detectable “colony” for each microbial cell in the sample. Thus, counting the visible colonies allows microbiologists to determine the number of microbial cells in a sample accurately. To perform microbial enumeration, bacterial cells can be dispersed on the surface of nutrient agar in Petri dishes (“agar plates”) and incubated under conditions that permit in situ bacterial replication. Microbial enumeration is simple, ultra-sensitive, inexpensive, and quantitative but is also slow. The long time required results in increased costs in healthcare and in manufacturing. More rapid enumeration methods have been developed but, while shortening the time required, they have sacrificed one or more of the critical advantages of microbial culture.
There is a need for additional culturing devices and methods for microbial enumeration.